Posts Tagged ‘banner’

Crazy Frog Banner Game

Tuesday, October 10th, 2006

crazyfrogI know I know. You hate the Crazy Frog. Yep, so do I, but work is work. Besides, I did my level best to inject as little evil as possible into this banner game! In fact, it actually ended up a fairly decent little game for what was just a day or so’s work.

First to address your fears:

  • There is NO Crazy Frog music in this game
  • There are NO popups in this game
  • There are NO horrid sound effects in this game

Right, with that out of the way, click the link and play the game! Click the mouse somewhere above the frog and he’ll leap upwards. Hit spikes or get crushed, and you’ll be killed (which isn’t the point of the game, but you might enjoy watching him die anyway). Climb as high as you can before you get squashed.

Postmortem:

It’s a simple game, but quite good fun in its own way. The level is pre-defined and whilst is a little unfair with hidden spikes that shoot out from a couple of places, is mostly a decent challenge. You can play in a very short space of time too, which means you don’t have to invest much effort to have another go.

We did a pretty good job of keeping evil out of this banner, which I personally think is essential for trustworthy advertising. If the banner annoys people, they’re hardly going to want to buy the product, right? The only minor bit of evil is at the top of the level, there’s a platform that’s just too far away to reach, so you always fail. This was done to save file-size in terms of having an end of level and a win sequence. It’s a banner after all.

I was pretty pleased with the motion of the frog itself. It seems that most people figure out how to get him to leap mostly where they want him to go within a few clicks, which is good. I’ve built other games along these lines where people just don’t get it no matter what. There’s a lesson here – a jump preview line would go a long way for user training, even if it’s only there for the first few jumps then vanishes.

Call of Juarez

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

call-of-juarezUse your mouse to shoot the baddies and avoid the maidens in this minigame promoting the Call of Juarez computer game.

This whole project was built start to end in a day from supplied graphics. It is intended as a throwaway banner game (without any evil popups etc), but actually turned out fairly decent for such a short build.